Inside Lucasfilm's Tangled Web Of Rights: What Disney Bought For $4B

">APGeorge Lucas recently cashed in by selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion.

The Walt Disney Company will have to untangle a complicated multi-studio web of rights in order to fully exploit its massive purchase last week of George Lucas' most memorable characters.

The Mouse House's deal to buy Lucasfilm is a near-total recall of its $4 billion purchase three years ago of comic-book company Marvel.

It's not just the dollar figures that were nearly identical. As with the comic-book company, Disney may have to shell out a hefty sum on top of the $4.05 billion it already spent to make the deal pay off, either by buying back rights or producing new films.

That's because any gold to be mined from those earlier space operas has to be shared with rivals.

The rights to the first film in the "Star Wars" franchise, retroactively titled "A New Hope," are wholly owned by 20th Century Fox, an individual with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap. And Fox's claim on Luke, Leia and Han Solo doesn't stop there. While Lucasfilm controls the other films in the series, Fox maintains theatrical and home-video distribution rights to those films through May 2020, historically charging a fee of between 6 percent to 8 percent of receipts.

Disney claims that it has no immediate plans to exploit Lucasfilm's other crown jewel, the Indiana Jones franchise, but should it change that stance, it faces another barrier.

Paramount, which distributed all four films in the adventure franchise, has an option to distribute any future sequels, an individual with knowledge of the pact told TheWrap. It only earns a distribution fee for its pains, but that will eat into any profits for Disney.

Should another Indy film make it out of the gate, that fee will be on the order of what the studio charged to handle the 2008 rollout of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:" Roughly 12.5 percent of theatrical, home entertainment, and television revenue.

It's a safe bet that Disney and its team of lawyers will be poring over contracts that Lucasfilm made with Paramount and particularly Fox to determine how expansive their claims on these films are and if they extend into digital avenues of distribution.

After all, in an industry struggling to compete with online streaming services like Netflix, the "Star Wars" films remain big sellers. When the six-disc set of "Star Wars: The Complete Saga" was released in 2011, it sold $84 million worth of Blu-rays worldwide in its first week of release and became the highest-selling Blu-ray catalog title in history.

Seth Willenson, a Hollywood valuation expert and consultant,believes that while the planned 3D re-releases of the "Star Wars" movies may generate substantial profits both in theaters and on Blu-ray and DVD, the series' true value is as a bulwark against the rapid evolution of entertainment -- an ecosystem that is being challenged by digital upstarts and new distribution streams daily.